With sudden impulse she threw the hateful volume to the floor and springing up, slipped to the gate. She looked to the bunkhouse, which seemed deserted. She saw Stemteemä, now awakened from repose, sitting at her teepee doorway. For a moment she stood, then hastened to the barn. Jim was nowhere in sight, but a thin trail of dust led over an eminence out on the flat. Densmore with angling rod and basket slung over his shoulder, was disappearing among the river pines.
The girl turned back to the house in disappointment. She had wished to placate Jim by carrying to him the pipe of peace. With a frown, she picked up the book and began perusing it again. The story, interesting to the whites, was wormwood to her Indian spleen. However, she determined to see how much of an ape the author had made of her breed-hero.
By adroit sketching, she had, in a short time the gist of the plot.
The scene opened on the Flathead, where a half-blood “brave” is in love with a white girl; the heroine of the story. He dares not make a declaration of his affection, because of his Indian blood. He curses his own mother for this heritage, hates his American parent for the sake of the girl of his heart. He deems himself beneath her; not good enough for her. But to cap the absurdity of the story, he weds the white “princess” and slaves for her the rest of his life.
Cogewea leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “Bosh!” she mused half aloud. “Show me the Red ‘buck’ who would slave for the most exclusive white ‘princess’ that lives. Such hash may go with the whites, but the Indian, both full bloods and the despised breeds know differently. And, that a ‘hero’ should be depicted as hating his own mother for the flesh and heart that she gave his miserable frame. What a figure to be held up for laudation by either novelist or historian! No man, whether First American, Caucasian or of any other race, could be so beastly inhuman in real life; so low and ungratefully base as to want to hide his own mother. The lower animals respond to this instinct, and can people suppose that the Indian, who is of the heroic, has not the manhood accredited to even the most commercialized of nations? The truth is, he has more love of the undying type than his ‘superior’ brother ever possessed.”
Cogewea reflected bitterly how her race had had the worst of every deal since the landing of the lordly European on their shores; how they had suffered as much from the pen as from the bayonet of conquest; wherein the annals had always been chronicled by their most deadly foes and partisan writers. In the light of unbiased facts, they had been no worse than any other race under similar conditions, and perhaps not so bad; the Caucasian not excepted. Human skins had never been nailed to their places of worship. In the comparison, although a breed, she spurned with resentment the implied inference that she was not the social equal of the most exalted of her self-constituted supermundanes. She felt a native pride in her Red forefathers who had fought so patriotically for home and country. Sterling manhood and womanhood, she was sure, carried with it, the elements of racial vanity; and as a stream cannot rise above its source, the “slaving hero” was doomed to a malarial death amid the brackish pools flowing from the quill of this neoteric writer.
In the meantime, Densmore had fished in vain. The fly went unsnapped. Little did he understand the habits of the finny tribe. The trout were taking their siesta. Disgusted, he reeled in his line and returned to the house.
Cogewea was startled from her reverie by a shadow falling across her lap. The broad shoulders of Densmore barred the rays of the low hanging sun. As she glanced up, he cast his hat at her feet with the challenge:
“If my hat is permitted, I shall regard it as propitious that I may follow.”
“Come in, Shoyahpee!”13 was the not altogether friendly greeting. “I just want to quarrel with somebody and you will do as well as anyone.”
“You can’t quarrel with me! Cage—Cogewea. I am—”
“Yes I can, I must! But I’m not mad at you. It is this book!”
“What is wrong with the inoffensive bundle of paper in board covers?”
“Wrong? It is all wrong; absurdly foolish. It is locoed; crazy! I cannot express my contempt for it; it is so ridiculously low and shamefully shallow.”
“The plot must be a terrible one,” rejoined her companion with a cynical smile. “Is there an author concerned?”
“It is said that ‘the Lord pities a fool,’ ” retorted the girl without apparent notice of his flippancy. “If this is true, then the writer of this volume is entitled to a double share of Divine commiseration. With the Indian, a demented person is supposed to have been deprived of reason through the medium of a medicine man or other occult channels. This author must have met with the same misfortune on a grand scale. The jocose part of the romance is that it contains a few tribal phrases, supposedly the names of birds and animals. These have been conferred on some of the characters, or pet saddle horses; which, if properly translated, would shock the public immeasurably. The ‘production’ would be discarded by all respectable readers.”
Jim, who had returned from a jaunt of inspection over an adjacent field, dismounted at the gate in time to hear the reference to the Indian names. Catching the drift of the conversation, and seemingly forgetful of the recent unpleasantness, he asked with mock gravity:
“Is all names in them there pages un’erstan’able?”
Glad of an opportunity of amendment for her rudeness of a few
